Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher is the Editor-At-Large of TechCrunch. Mike is also involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub, in London initially.

A long time journalist, Mike has written for U.K. national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. He is a former editor of New Media Age magazine, the leading new media weekly in the UK, and the European edition of The Industry Standard magazine.

Since 1996 he has launched numerous media web sites and in 2000 he was nominated as NetMedia's European Internet Journalist of the Year. In 2004 he was voted ""One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade"" by GfK NOP, the fourth-largest custom research business in the world. In July 2008 he was put at No. 47 out of the Top 100 people in London's creative industry by The Independent newspaper and The Hospital Club. In August 2008 TechCrunch Europe was awarded the best ""Web 2.0 and business blog"" in the U.K., by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine. In 2009 it was named as one of the Top 10 blogs out of the U.K.

Also in 2009 he was named one of the Top 10 bloggers on Twitter in the U.K. In October 2009 he was named one of the Top 50 most influential Britons in technology by The Daily Telegraph. In April 2010 he was named as one of Britain's Top 100 ""digital power-brokers"" by Wired UK magazine. In November 2010 he was named as one of London's most influential people in New Media and ""king of dotcom commentators"" by The Evening Standard Newspaper. In February he was listed as one of the Top 100 most influential people on Twitter in the UK. He has spoken at the prestigious Monaco Media Forum and Le Web, among many other conferences. Mike is a regular commentator on the technology business, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4, and Bloomberg.

Latest from Mike Butcher

UK entrepreneur Raj Anand, founded of kwiqq, has had his Facebook account disabled after he individually emailed all his friends and members of a Facebook group he runs. Anand recently launched an independent social network for Salsa dancers in Brighton and set up a Facebook group to support it. It was this group he was contacting.
As he blogs today:
I have spent god knows how many hours… Read More

Well, it’s been the first week in a new year here at TCUK Towers. The office still has bits of stray tinsel doggedly hanging onto the ceiling, while the interns are padding around sheepishly after that riotous Christmas party. But luckily I can ignore the drudgery of office life as my secretary has just popped in to tell me that it’s time to get stuck in to a pile of startups. To… Read More

The so-called ‘secondary ticket market’ has a bad rep in the UK. Scruffy ticket touts outside concert venues have been the traditional conduit for unsold tickets and they operate under the guise of everything from a shifty looking guy outside the venue all the way through to agencies – some even linked to organised crime – who bulk-buy the biggest concerts to sell on for… Read More

Apple comes in for some stick from the Financial Times this morning, which wonders why it will take the master of the iPod up to six months to bring the price of tracks on iTunes’ UK site down into line with other European countries. Granted, Apple’s move will address a European Commission antitrust probe, as it will now offer Brits the same price for iTunes downloads as on the… Read More

Google, IBM and VeriSign are all in talks with the OpenID foundation with a view to joining imminently, according to a highly-placed source. Digg, Technorati, Microsoft, AOL, Plaxo and WikiPedia have previously announced their intention to support the standard which is seen as an easy way for users to use a single digital identity across the Internet. The official news about the new players… Read More

The European Union is very likely to rain on the whole data portability parade. Data privacy laws around the world do not uniformly fall into line when it comes to the likes of Google and Facebook. For instance, as ZDNet enterprise blogger Dennis Howlett cogently points out, article 8 of the UK Data Protection Act states:
8. Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory… Read More

FoundRead has a post called 9 VCs You’re Gonna Want to Avoid (but there are actually 12). It particularly applies to startups who already have revenues, who are now being courted by VCs. It’s an open question, but I’d just like to ask the general UK startup community out there: What do you think would be the UK/European equivalent? Here are some suggestions (inspired by… Read More

In a major move Facebook, Google and Plaxo are effectively ending their policy of keeping users locked-in to their social networks. As TechCrunch US reports, today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup, implying that users will soon be allowed to export their contacts from one social network to another, leaving each to compete on their own merits. It’s hard… Read More

In evidence that a year on from launch it is not standing still, UK ‘social reviews’ startup TrustedPlaces has signed a deal with TopTable, Europe’s largest online restaurant booking service, allowing users to book restaurants online via the site. TopTable has access to 3,000 restaurants across Europe. TrustedPlaces members can review restaurants, bars, hotels, cafes and… Read More

Privately-owned SMS archiving site Treasure My Text is launching a new invite-only beta version with social messaging features. Currently you can save a text message by forwarding it via SMS to the TreasureMyText standard rate mobile number. You can later view your messages online, plus there is RSS and email archiving. The service – going since 2005 and based in Liverpool, UK with… Read More

Texas-based Pluck, the social media platform provider, has signed a deal with the UK’s Guardian Unlimited which will now use its SiteLife suite, which gives comment, rating, video, forum, blogs and social profile features to readers. The Guardian currently powers its blogs with Six Apart’s MovableType. GU had previously used Pluck’s BlogBurst service to aggregate material… Read More

UK startups prepping their next social media or social networking site need to be aware of the sleeping (admittedly nearly dead) dragon of Friends Reunited. The biggest “Web 1.0″ social network in the UK has been declining for years due to a lack of investment on the part of owners ITV, the TV channel. But now it’s set to undergo a name change as part of a strategic… Read More

In the next 24 hours UK feed-reading and commenting aggregator Fav.or.it plans to open up its API to allow anyone to send comments to any blog in the world. Founder Nick Halstead told me via public Twitter that he was “exposing the API for the first time so developers can get going” prior to the full launch of the service. The startup is still in closed beta. Favorit’s… Read More

Property search engine Nestoria has signed three new partner deals. Channel 4’s 4Homes has integrated Nestoria’s search engine here, as has major national UK national newspaper The Independent here. In addition, free financial news paper CityAM has also started using the service for property search. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.
Nestoria has racked up some useful kudos in… Read More

In a brilliant piece of deduction, Pat Phelan and Florian Seroussi of telco startup Maxroam estimate on their blog that time spent on Twitter will cost $13.5bn in lost productivity 2008. How did they reach this eye-watering figure?
Reversing the normal question ‘what are Twitter’s costs’ to ‘what’s the cost of Twitter’ Phelan and Seroussi got out the calculator. Read More

It’s a little harsh on the eye and could do with an interface makeover but Don’t Stay In could well be the biggest UK-based social network you’ve never heard of. That said, you have probably heard of it if you like going clubbing and having your photo taken by DSI “spotters”, because as its publicly available traffic page shows, it’s clocking up some… Read More

How ironic. Just as Scoble and Faceboook were clashing (then later making up) about who owns his 5000 contacts, a new UK report has named both Facebook and Bebo the best social networks for features like privacy and security, including how easy it is to remove personal details.
Independent consumer advocate Computing Which? found Bebo and Facebook scored 79% and 74% respectively for their… Read More

According to various reports, one of the hot items given as presents this year was vouchers for digital music stores and media players like iPods. That must be the main reason why figures showing online downloads more than doubled in the UK in the last week of 2007 compared with 2006, according to analysts at UBS. The industry is hoping falling CD sales (heaven knows why when you can more… Read More

Skype is coming to the Sony PlayStation Portable. As reghardware reports, Sony’s own website now says: “Call friends, talk trash to fellow gamers or catch up with acquaintances via Skype for PSP.” Looks like someone forgot to switch that bit off before the CES show in Vegas. Interestingly, Sony Europe has been cooking up communications tools for the handheld with none other… Read More